Mr. Benesh’s Online Community

I recently read this article (http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0129/p13s01-stct.html), and it contained some useful information for all educators within the next 5 or 10 years. Don’t get me wrong, these are designed for third world countries, and places where low income is a huge barrier for technology. Not here in CANADA where we are always afforded such luxuries. Heh.

In any case, my favourite quote was:

“One of the misconceptions about computers and kids is that kids need training, they need to be taught how to use a computer,” Mr. Bender says. “There’s overwhelming evidence over 40 years that that is not the case.”

I don’t know exactly how I feel about this. For myself, no, I essentially need no computer training, and have not had much formal computer training in my life. I just played around, learned from my brother, learned from my family computer, learned at school. However, I am a very highly motivated self-learner. I also had experiences at my Internship that would tell me that not everyone is like this anymore. These students not only required training/teaching (save one special girl), they essentially wanted everything spoon fed to them. You try to get them to do a little bit of digging to find out how to do something, and they have their hand up so fast, it makes your head spin. Or makes you run around the room trying to help everyone (aka. give them the answer).

I do think that the general computer knowledge of children is increasing. But what happens, then, when the average knowledge/skill level keeps going up, is that we continuously have to create teachers who are above that average. And that is hard. What is the future? I think we might end up having students teaching teachers some things. Formally, I mean; there are already many times when they teach us things informally. Also, perhaps a $100 laptop wouldn’t be a bad idea in Regina schools. A bulky laptop would be easier to break, spill juice on, get crums in. I shudder to think how some students would treat these machines. Likely as poorly as they treat their textbooks? In that case, I’ll look forward to picking one up off the road, like I did in my Internship. Hah.